


Sacred Ghosts

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-30
Updated: 2010-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-08 12:58:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel





	Sacred Ghosts

He sees her first at their grandparents’ house, and thinks, with the logic of a child, that her name is utterly wrong, that there has been some mistake, and, still a (pampered) child, worries at his mother’s cloak till she turns away from her sister (well loved, and much missed, these three years of France) and bends to him so he can put his mouth to her ear, and, chin against the pearl, ask whether she is not his sister. His mother (so lovely, then and always, even drained to a sick pallor in the fight she wages and loses against her own body) laughs and ruffles his hair, and leans close to her sister to tell her. And Aunt Druella arches a fine eyebrow and pushes the daughter behind her skirts towards him, and turns away while his mother looks at him and then at her, long and calculating.

Her sisters find them later, when they tire of their own games—she is still their favourite doll, though the elder thinks herself too old to play thus any longer—peering out a high window to the grounds below, and he finds himself dragged unceremoniously off the perch it took so much labour to attain, and critically examined. He stares back, unafraid, into eyes like his (unlike hers) for the minute it takes to be pronounced satisfactory. Half the hour finds him divested of his tale of living in Rouen, and a quarter more has him pushed away. He spends some little while staring at the two girls who have bent their dark heads (brown and black mingling) out the window, summoning the courage to protest, before she slips a hand into his and starts pulling him away.

“But we got here first,” he says (the first words he remembers saying to her) at the door.

“I know somewhere better,” she says, and not one word more till he follows her out.

The somewhere better is among the roses redolent with perfume, and they sit on stone carved by time and the elements, and trade stories and secrets till the first chill wind of evening (spring not quite there, yet) brings the mothers to them—the first time he sees Aunt Druella agitated, and very nearly the last—and they are brought, rose-scented and sleepy, back to the room that has been made a nursery for their stay.

***

That she is his sister is a conviction that lasts till his father disillusions him a month later, and in no uncertain terms, but that they are alike (and that she is unlike her sisters) is so obvious a fact that nobody can tell him otherwise. It is not as though they truly try, nor, really, that he so tells them—Abraxas Malfoy is not a man whose disapproval one courts.

His mother he had first asked, and would, perhaps, have asked again, when memory of his father’s displeasure had somewhat faded, but she lingers scant months past his fourth birthday, and what would have been his sister’s first becomes a day of death for his mother.

His father married for all the reasons for which men like him wed women like his mother, but he grew, perhaps, enamoured of her beauty, and wit, and carriage, and wealth, and the gentle affection she bestowed on all worthy of it. Or perhaps he simply wishes not to have a four-year-old running at his heels, all hours of the day. Her sister comes to her husband’s aid, upon the demise of Fiona Malfoy nee Rosier, and her son finds himself travelling with his aunt to her house, sent away by the father from whom he has inherited nothing save unbreakable, infinitely malleable steel, and steel-grey eyes.

All else is his mother’s, and this aunt of his so much resembles her that in the first week he finds himself dogging her every step till she begins to find him far more trouble than even her own eldest daughter. Her youngest he clings to even harder (small and delicate, and his mother had been a grown woman, and had still died) and she shadows him and he her till even Cygnus Black (not a man given to too much reflection about his children) calls him her brother.

The elder two commiserate with him, but an aunt seen but four times in living memory can hardly compete with a new born cousin, and that the heir of the clan. Too, the boy is doubly a Black, and Bellatrix—herself raised by this far-more boisterous aunt—is called away to London to keep company and provide entertainment to Walburga Black. Andromeda—having been asked, and having politely declined—declines also the company of her youngest sister, and Lucius Malfoy finds Narcissa Black his sole companion till the trees that had turned russet for his birthday, and borne bare black branches for his mother’s funeral, turn green again, and his father calls him home in April, a full year after he first saw her.

***

Nine months—till his mother has been underneath the earth, in a vault where his father’s body will lie, too, and his, a year and a month—he lives alone with his father in Malfoy Manor, the house empty without his mother and the friends she used fill it with, and the grounds ghostly without the care needed for the picnics she was famed for. Narcissa comes twice, in all that time, and her mother many times more, and his father never looks at him without his mother’s memory dancing between them, all their love poured into her spectre and none left for each other.

At the end of that time, his father is again engaged, this to a woman nothing like his mother, a woman who, when she visits the house, looks at his mother’s study and at him with the same dismissive glance. That it never becomes marriage is because of his Aunt Druella, who, in an unprecedented show of hospitality, invites his father’s fiancée to her house. Walburga Black has borne another son, and she and he and her elder son and her husband are all at her brother’s house at Serpentshead when Melisandre Dubois walks onto the grounds with him trailing several steps behind. Two hours later, after she walks back out of the elegantly-appointed house, Walburga puts her youngest into the spindly arms of a waiting house-elf, and puts out a hand for him.

He puts his in hers, and lets himself be pulled close. Her eyes are like her favourite niece’s, like his, and they soften not at all while she puts her free hand on his shoulder.

“Walburga, he should go eat, now, and then I have to send him home.”

“I doubt,” she says, “that he’s hungry, Druella. Are you?”

He glances over the other shoulder at his Aunt, then back at the woman whose face is nothing like hers or Narcissa’s (or his mother’s). “No.”

“You’re a big boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Ma’am.”

She glances at her brother, then at the toddler who has crowded close to her. “Are you a big boy, Sirius?” The child nods vehemently, in some danger of tumbling back to the floor. “You know to keep your rights, don’t you?”

“Ma’am.”

“You will,” she says, and then Aunt Druella’s hand is tight on his other shoulder and she’s let him go, pulling her son up into her arms.

What Aunt Druella tells his father he doesn’t know, but Abraxas Malfoy never weds again, even after his mother has faded away.

***

A tutor comes to the Manor, before the month is out, and he has scarcely settled into the new routine before his father leaves. France, again, and no word of how long he will stay—England, he will learn later, they had returned to only because his mother had wished to—perhaps till Fiona entirely deserts her husband’s house. Her son has begun to forget her, but will not admit it and stubbornly holds to his memory of her face, though already it looks more like her sister’s or her niece’s. The tutor is a man with the name of Wulfstan Schreiker, a Durmstrang education, and a referral from Franz Koenig, one of his father’s friends, who has hopes of teaching at his alma mater, but is content, meanwhile, to teach the scions of British and German pureblood clans. That he understands no French is a constant source of irritation only barely compensated by his store of tales of old magic and monsters, all of which he relates to Narcissa with great relish on her visits.

On Narcissa’s eleventh visit—once a month, and Aunt Druella comes every week, now that his father has gone—Bellatrix accompanies her and lies lengthwise on the armchair and rolls her eyes while he talks to her sister. She’s to start at school in a month, and has bought her wand already, and refuses to let them touch it. But she knows and shares stories Wulfstan has never told him, perhaps does not know. They are nothing like Wulfstan’s stories, and Bellatrix’s eyes gleam when she tells them, and he finds his hand clutched tight in Narcissa’s before she has finished. The story stays with him, and the eyes, after they have left.

The night before his birthday brings with it two owls, one from his father who cannot find the time to return, but has remembered to send an extravagant gift. The other is an eagle owl who carries a letter with the Black crest, and who stands guard while Wulfstan reads it to him, and writes out an assent to visit Walburga Black at Grimmauld Place.

He turns seven while fighting off Sirius Black, who is three and has taken a liking to his hair. Walburga Black makes no move while he tries to placate and, failing that, shoves her son off him to stand up. Narcissa sidles up as well and pulls his hair and then escapes behind Aunt Druella, who disapproves of boys fighting girls.

When Wulfstan tracks him down again, he is in the library, listening to Andromeda hold forth on Merlin, half-leaning against Narcissa, Sirius squashed face-down on his lap, a hand on the middle of his back to keep him from struggling.

***

Christmas brings his father home, face twisting in a smile when he proves too tall to comfortably pick up. It is, however, not a smile that lasts after his tutor has made his report, and he finds Aunt Druella’s visits cut down to once a month, Narcissa’s to holidays, and excursions to Grimmauld Place to nothing. Wulfstan, instead, takes him rambling over the Manor grounds, and instructs him in rudimentary herbology. His father uses Christmas to introduce him to his friends, and if he finds it exhausting to be paraded thus, he knows enough to keep his words to himself. His pleasure at being allowed to spend New Years’ Eve with Narcissa and her sisters and cousins he keeps as quiet about.

Abraxas Malfoy takes his son to Wales, in spring, that he may watch the land being brought alive by the Druids. A girl comes up to him, as he sits by the bonfire, and pulls him up, one-handed, and draws him into the dance. A long-legged dark-haired boy deems him too young to leap the fire and does it himself, Lucius sat on his shoulders, clutching desperately at his wild hair. His father plucks him off as the boy laughs up into his face, and keeps a large hand wrapped ’round his wrist the rest of the night.

Some of his fear that night his father takes for exultation, and Wulfstan goes one early morning to Diagon Alley and returns with a Silver Arrow, modified slightly for beginners, and they spend the next week flying all morning. Aunt Druella, on her monthly visit, is shown into his father’s study and leaves and forgets to come the next month.

He is eight that year, and Bellatrix owls him, and sends a bag of candy from Honeydukes’. Aunt Druella visits and brings Narcissa. His father watches his sister-in-law and her daughter in stony silence before retreating to his study, and a quarter of an hour finds him in his room, surrounded with gifts, and quite without anyone.

In November he begs Wulfstan to let him into the vault, and stands in front of his mother’s coffin till his tutor drags him away. He saw ghosts, in Wales, who gathered round the bonfire. They came for the festivals, Hywel had said, and some came on the day they’d died. He stands an hour, every week, all the week, and his mother never does appear. When Narcissa arrives the month after, he does not, nor tries to, remember how she resembles his mother.


End file.
